Mutual Learning for Policy Impact: Insights from CORE. Adapting research methods in the context of Covid-19

On 25 November 2021, the CORE Knowledge Translation Services team at the Institute of Development Studies, UK, hosted an online clinic session to facilitate the sharing of experiences and mutual learning on how CORE projects have or can adapt their research activities in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. The clinic was attended by 22 CORE members from 12 projects and featured contributions from two CORE projects: The Youth Question in Africa: Impact, Response and Protection Measures in the IGAD Region and A New Digital Deal for an Inclusive Post-Covid-19 Social Compact: Developing Digital Strategies for Social and Economic Reconstruction. This learning guide captures the practical insights and advice from the event, to help inform the practice of participants and other projects across the portfolio.

Dignity in the Work Lives of Clinical Nurses

<p>This descriptive study examines how clinical nurses understand, experience, and sustain dignity in their work lives. Nursing has embedded dignity, particularly the dignity of others, as a core professional value. However, while the practice of nursing is deeply concerned with the achievement of patient dignity, dignity as a self-regarding professional right is not well articulated. Hodson's (2001) model for dignity at work provided a lens through which to examine the relevant nursing literature. It was revealed that the dignity of nurses as an intrinsic human and worker right has received little explicit attention, and that the significance of this is possibly not sufficiently well understood. A qualitative descriptive approach was used to further investigate the area of nurse dignity. Seven nurses were recruited to participate in facilitated workshops to explore the research question, 'How do clinical nurses understand, experience, and sustain dignity in their work lives'? The data were analysed using directed content analysis and presented as a descriptive summary. Dignity, for the participants, was strongly associated with the worth, value, and meaning that nurses attach to their profession, to the work that they do, and to themselves personally. This was shown to be central to their understanding, experience, and achievement of dignity in their work lives. Each encounter, each moment, was seen to be invested with the potential to maintain, affirm, erode or infringe personal dignity. The nurses perceived nursing to be a meaningful, worthwhile endeavour, but frequently struggled to extract a sense of dignity when working in environments that they perceived as not supporting their agenda of care. Being seen as a respected professional, enjoying daily positive interactions with colleagues and being successful in the act of nursing, had the strongest association with the ability to extract worth, value, and meaning from the work experience. The absence of a perception of the participants' need to regard managerial colleagues was an unexpected finding. It was concluded that dignity should be pursued as a right in any context including the work context of nurses, both as a moral and pragmatic imperative. It is suggested that the current dominant approach that interests itself in the needs of nurses primarily as a means to achieving health care outcomes for patients may be neglecting an important dimension. Future inquiry into the area of nurse dignity should begin from the premise that to understand the meaning that nurses attach to dignity, one first has to understand the meaning that nurses attach to nursing, and in particular the nature of the social compact that nursing holds with society.</p>

Dignity in the Work Lives of Clinical Nurses

<p>This descriptive study examines how clinical nurses understand, experience, and sustain dignity in their work lives. Nursing has embedded dignity, particularly the dignity of others, as a core professional value. However, while the practice of nursing is deeply concerned with the achievement of patient dignity, dignity as a self-regarding professional right is not well articulated. Hodson's (2001) model for dignity at work provided a lens through which to examine the relevant nursing literature. It was revealed that the dignity of nurses as an intrinsic human and worker right has received little explicit attention, and that the significance of this is possibly not sufficiently well understood. A qualitative descriptive approach was used to further investigate the area of nurse dignity. Seven nurses were recruited to participate in facilitated workshops to explore the research question, 'How do clinical nurses understand, experience, and sustain dignity in their work lives'? The data were analysed using directed content analysis and presented as a descriptive summary. Dignity, for the participants, was strongly associated with the worth, value, and meaning that nurses attach to their profession, to the work that they do, and to themselves personally. This was shown to be central to their understanding, experience, and achievement of dignity in their work lives. Each encounter, each moment, was seen to be invested with the potential to maintain, affirm, erode or infringe personal dignity. The nurses perceived nursing to be a meaningful, worthwhile endeavour, but frequently struggled to extract a sense of dignity when working in environments that they perceived as not supporting their agenda of care. Being seen as a respected professional, enjoying daily positive interactions with colleagues and being successful in the act of nursing, had the strongest association with the ability to extract worth, value, and meaning from the work experience. The absence of a perception of the participants' need to regard managerial colleagues was an unexpected finding. It was concluded that dignity should be pursued as a right in any context including the work context of nurses, both as a moral and pragmatic imperative. It is suggested that the current dominant approach that interests itself in the needs of nurses primarily as a means to achieving health care outcomes for patients may be neglecting an important dimension. Future inquiry into the area of nurse dignity should begin from the premise that to understand the meaning that nurses attach to dignity, one first has to understand the meaning that nurses attach to nursing, and in particular the nature of the social compact that nursing holds with society.</p>

The Advent of Media Modernity out of Wild Bill's Ashes

This article positions David Milch's Deadwood (2004–6) as a narrative universe that merits serious theoretical scrutiny on account of its far-reaching account of the dawn of American technocapitalism. While Kittlerian media-archaeological wisdom situates media modernity's primal scene at the turn of the century (with the emergence of the Edisonian gramophone, film, and typewriter), Deadwood figures the multimedia Big Bang as having taken place a few decades prior, with the advent of telegraphy, photography, and railroads. In the world of Deadwood, this “Discourse Network 1876” condenses in the spectral figure of George Hearst, a tyrannical mining and media magnate who descends on Deadwood to seize and consolidate the area's gold mining rights. When community leaders Al Swearengen and Seth Bullock rise up to resist Hearst, he wields the cybernetic grid of Discourse Network 1876 to run roughshod over the town's fragile social compact. Although this vision of the American Leviathan is a bleak one (and therein resides much of Deadwood's tragic mythos), Milch's Deadwood: The Movie (2019) revisits the town a decade later and rehabilitates the notion that a tightknit community of concerned citizens can, under the right conditions, serve as a viable, but precarious, bulwark against the Hearstian electrical storm.

Social innovation : understanding selected Durban-based interior designers' perceptions of socially responsible interior design

In a world with pressing social issues that require the collaboration of multiple stakeholders to solve them, this research sought to find out through the views of interior design practitioners how social innovation might be integrated into interior design for socially responsible design. The research sought to find out from the perceptions of the participants whether social innovation practices could be integrated into interior design as an ethos for professional practice, rather than fragmented, erratic projects. The research postulates that interior design practices are similar if not complementary to those of social innovation. Both interior design and social innovation focus on the human dimension and understanding of human behaviour to construct realities that people occupy and offer an enhanced human experience. The aim was to establish whether interior design practitioners saw social innovation as a tool for more socially responsible design and whether they have engaged in social innovation and socially responsible design in their practice. The research followed an exploratory qualitative research approach positioned in the interpretive paradigm. The research used semistructured participant interviews and thematic analysis to explore in-depth insights into the perspectives and experiences of 13 Durban-based interior designers and their perceptions of social innovation integration for socially responsible design. Through a literature review, the researcher studied social innovation, design for social innovation, socially responsible design, interior design's social compact and interior design's value proposition. The conceptual framework put forward a plausible sequence of activities that can be carried out for interior design to interact with social innovation for socially responsible design. Doing so could contribute to the interior design social compact. The thematic analysis was employed to structure the research and explore the current level of understanding and engagement of interior designers in social innovation for socially responsible design. What emerged were challenges and opportunities for integrating social innovation for socially responsible design as an interior design ethos. Guided by the conceptual framework in the research, five themes emerged in the data analysis guided by the conceptual framework: Social Problem Identification, Interior Design Process, Social Innovation Process, Socially Responsible Design Process and Social Value. The findings revealed that the selected interior designers were largely unaware of social innovation and last interacted in a socially responsible design during a once-off university project. Although the participants' comprehension was at times muddled, the aggregate of their perceptions demonstrated a general grasp of what social innovation and socially responsible design are. It was interesting to note how difficult it was for interior designers to conceptualize the terms "social," "social innovation," and "socially responsible design." The majority of participants distinguished between social innovation and socially responsible design as differing concepts. Even with a basic knowledge of social innovation, most participants expressed confidence in implementing and leading teams based on socially responsible and socially innovative programs. The participants believed that their potential could only be constrained by finances, personal security, a lack of education and expertise in the cultural context of the social innovation project. The designers believed that social innovation for socially responsible design should be required in interior design and monetization, professional body, education and the other components of socially responsible design are crucial in doing so. Of the advantages of integrating social innovation for socially responsible interior design communicated by the participants, the most significant was the change of collective expectations of interior design by the general public and other business professionals. The participants shared that social innovation would favour the discipline by demonstrating to the public and other practitioners that it was about more than shallow design aesthetics. Interior design is, however, about substance and complicated problem-solving. The participants shared their challenges and methods, which could help integrate social innovation into interior design for socially responsible design.

Resilience Humanitarianism and Peacebuilding

How do we build the foundations for more resilient social, economic, and political systems and link individual with collective resilience to sustain change across generations? These are pressing questions in the fields of resilience humanitarianism and peacebuilding, fields that seek transformative, sustainable changes to achieve ambitious goals affecting research, policy and practice. This chapter provides three examples of systems-level thinking on resilience that have structured the architecture of the humanitarian and peacebuilding agenda. These examples offer proof-of-concept approaches to synergistically foster wealth, health, and peace, in ways that link: resilience and peacebuilding to household wealth and food security; resilience and social cohesion to individual health and stress regulation; and cultures of peace to caregiving and early child development. They emphasize a theory of change that strives to strengthen the social compact between state, civil society, and families in contexts of fragility, conflict, or forced displacement. Resilience is an everyday practice for crisis-affected communities, one rooted in the political economy of social action and structural transformation. Efforts to build systems-level resilience require careful work with respect to conceptual clarity, meaningful measurement, and grounded intervention.

Federalism in a Time of Coronavirus: The Trump Administration, Intergovernmental Relations, and the Fraying Social Compact

This article examines Trump administration social welfare policies in order to better understand their implications for American federalism and the evolving welfare state. We focus particularly on the use of waivers and other administrative tools to promote work requirements and benefit restrictions in the two largest means tested spending programs: Medicaid and SNAP. These policies are accelerating the fragmentation of America’s welfare state and continued movement toward variable speed, “fend for yourself” federalism. This hyper-partisan, polarized, variegated model of federalism is resulting in increasingly diverse patterns of state implementation of national policies.